This week’s visualization comes from BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based company responsible for the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol.
BitTorrent’s visualization is a time-lapsed movie with some 60 million global clients logging in over a 24-hour period. Each frame represents six minutes of real time. “Each time a pixel lights up,” writes BitTorrent’s Kara Murphy, “it’s a client (either BitTorrent or µTorrent) in that square of the world checking in with our servers.”
The video (embedded below) was inspired by NASA’s Earth at Night, where electric lights at nighttime highlight the highly populated and developed regions of the world.
The data for the visualization comes from GeoIP lookups from the company’s access logs.
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This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We’re always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there’s a visualization you think we should know about.
OSCON 2012 Data Track — Today’s system architectures embrace many flavors of data: relational, NoSQL, big data and streaming. Learn more in the Data track at OSCON 2012, being held July 16-20 in Portland, Oregon.
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